Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Are Tablets Dead?”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here with a quick word on tablets. We got tablets a couple years ago to fill the void between the smartphone and the laptop. I don’t know if we needed to fill that void, but what we got was something that’s a little more personal than a laptop, but also a little more spacious than a smartphone and just a lot of fun to use and it took off. The ipad was obviously huge and it got a spike in popularity pretty quickly. A lot of people could say it was just a bigger iphone and in a lot of ways it really was, but that was fine people loved the iphone already, and we did get way more tablets that followed it in the next few years now fast forward. To today and we’ve seen an evolution in all three categories and they kind of converge, our smartphones do more and more in 2010, the industry standard for your big smartphone.
If you remember, was the 4.3 inch display all the big smartphones had the 4.3 inch display. Today. That’S literally considered compact by a lot of standards, so the smartphones are getting bigger, as they’re capable of doing more laptops are also in a bit of a transitional period too.
There are still plenty of big laptops, but now we also are starting to see laptops that are nearly as thin and as light as tablets. So that’s again kind of blurring the line and we even see some convertible machines. That kind of try to be both but right in the middle tablets are tablets dead, well, they’ve also evolved in the past couple years. They’Ve gotten better and better, and the best tablets ever have come out the most recently. So you might not think so, but on the other hand, if you look on paper, tablets are a dying breed by volume. Tablet purchases over the last few years have actually started declining, they didn’t level off. They started to go down 24 million tablets shipped in quarter 4 2014 16 million tablets shipped in quarter for 2015.. That’S like a minus 20 difference, that’s not a little bit off! That’S a big drop off and plenty of research has gone into trying to figure out. Why and it’s sort of still a new category, so there’s no definitive answer why people are buying less tablets, but you can see that the big smartphones getting larger and larger and the small laptops getting smaller and smaller has sort of pushed tablets into this sort of A specialty category, they still do a ton, they have the best hardware they’ve ever had they have way more optimized apps. They have better dedicated accessories.
You can game on them. You can surf the web on them. You can explore.
You can take pictures with them. You can do so much more on a tablet than you could in the past. Performance is great battery life is great.
Tablets has never been better, but the total user base of these tablets has hit its peak. So discovery was great that initial spike with the ipad and all the huge competition in the first year or two was awesome, and then it’s just sort of leveled off. There are two main reasons i think, to explain why people are buying less tablets now than that initial spike number one is people, don’t upgrade their tablets as often the smartphone industry as much as we love it has people upgrading every 12 to 18 months. Maybe every two years your tablet you’re not upgrading every one or two years, a lot of people who are buying tablets for the more casual stuff.
Your light gaming, your web browsing, your surfing that stuff doesn’t need a new model every two years, so you’ll just buy one and kind of let it sit around use it for a while number. Two. On top of all that convergence, one could argue that there’s been a genuine lack of any super, exciting crazy, new features and tablets in the past couple years. If you look at that tech of the year 2015 video and just look at what tablets have been doing in the past year or two sure, they’ve kind of pushed up against what laptops are doing and try to do more, but still try to stay as friendly As a smartphone, but in the end they still find themselves somewhere in the middle with sort of a niche and that’s exactly what it is at the end of the day.
They’Re not dying they’re, just more focused and that’s exactly what they need tablets turns out are not for everyone they’re, a niche. There was all this awesome enthusiasm at the beginning when tablets first came out about all the possibilities of what they could do, but now we’ve realized it’s these pockets of users. These dedicated smaller groups, tablets aren’t for everyone, but they are for the parent, who wants to buy their kid, not a smartphone, but still something to keep them entertained or the casual gamer who wants a bigger screen than his smartphone, but doesn’t want to carry a laptop Around or the graphic designer who wants a specifically really good, stylus, designing experience stuff like that.
These pockets of users, who are dedicated and enthusiastic about tablets are not dying, they’re just sort of discovering themselves thanks for watching and talk to you guys in the next one peace .